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Just because you’re not on Facebook or Twitter doesn’t mean your data is safe from the social media giants or their prying algorithms. A study from the University of Vermont adds yet more evidence to the argument that your privacy is no longer in your hands, even if you abstain from social media.

Researchers from UVM's Department of Mathematics and Statistics published a paper in this week’s issue of the journal Nature Human Behaviour demonstrating that social media users not only generate “substantial behavioral data about themselves” but also about members of their social circle.

Were you feeling virtuous this past year when all the bad news about Facebook piled up because you never created an account? Well, hopefully, you don’t have any friends or family, because if they have social media profiles, chances are you're a known quantity to social media companies.

The researchers gathered more than 30 million public posts on Twitter (excluding retweets) from a total of 13,905 English-language users (attempting to eliminate bots and non-personal accounts) to populate their model. Instead of simply tracking keywords via language modeling or just quantifying information within a certain time frame, the researchers used information theoretic tools that incorporated both structural and temporal approaches to get a more complete picture of a user’s online persona. They also processed the tweets of each user’s most frequent Twitter contacts to see if they could use that data to help predict future tweets from the original user. And it turns out these complex predictive models give away a lot more information than we’d like to believe.

By extrapolating from the data provided by just 8 or 9 of a user’s contacts, the researchers were able to show that the tweets of friends allowed them to predict quite a bit about the original user. The original user’s Tweets allowed them to predict future tweets with an accuracy rate of roughly 64% and the user’s contacts gave them enough data to predict behavior with an accuracy rate of 61%. So, go ahead and delete your account, but information about you is still going to be generated (and pretty accurately) if you have a close relationship with at least 8 people who use the platform.

This analysis showed that “information within the Twitter messages from 8 or 9 of a person's contacts make it possible to predict that person's later tweets as accurately as if they were looking directly at that person's own Twitter feed.”

Now, there is a mathematical upper limit on how much predictive information a social network can hold. They can’t know everything about you, but they can know some things.

Who are “they”? Well, anyone who would bother to profile you – companies who want to sell you things or government agencies who want information about you. And what can they know? Not necessarily your deepest, darkest secrets, but certainly things like your political or religious affiliation and products you might be interested in. The same things platforms like Facebook and Twitter know (and sell) about their users.

The researchers went on to acknowledge that their research “raises profound questions about the fundamental nature of privacy—and how, in a highly networked society, a person's choices and identity are embedded in that network.”

"There's no place to hide in a social network," said co-author Lewis Mitchell.

You alone don't control your privacy on social media platforms. Your friends have a say too.

Think you’re not being profiled because you don’t have a social media profile? Not so much. While the mathematical models are complex to the uninitiated, they’re no big deal for a social media company to put to work. Facebook or Twitter can develop a profile for you and even potentially use it to track you or sell "your" data.

I earned a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science and currently work as a freelance writer, instructor, and speaker on topics ranging from the history of medicine to…

I earned a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science and currently work as a freelance writer, instructor, and speaker on topics ranging from the history of medicine to the ethics of future technology. I created and run the Top 10 List of Emerging Ethical Dilemmas and Policy Issues in Science and Technology, which has over a quarter of a million readers worldwide. My work has appeared in international news and trade outlets, and I am currently working on my first book on public perceptions of future technology.
I’ve held public outreach positions in higher education and served as the Managing Editor of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on science and technology ethics, medical history, science communication, women’s history, and research ethics.